


Brute Sympathy

by vitallilac



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Canon Rewrite, Complicated Relationships, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, Friendship, Healing, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Post-Movie, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance, This will get weird, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-11-22 08:09:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20870981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vitallilac/pseuds/vitallilac
Summary: Hello, it's been a while. I hope you remember me. I tried to be your friend, in a weird way. Not that it did much good in the end. Half a mind on you, half a mind on the horizon, you get me? Well. I'd like you to know, Noreena. That I never meant to leave.-Ocean Jasper has someone she's been meaning to say hello to for a long time. She finds them on the cliff.





	1. Brecciated

**Author's Note:**

> The fic assumes some events, makes others up, but nothing that would significantly alter the story in any way. They're flavour, meant to highlight certain emotions and experiences. The fic assumes Jasper does nothing significant post CYM, and that she is a Noreena.

There’s not much left that you remember of this planet—it’s all assorted shades of green and blue and pink. It’s a house you once lived in, were born in. Protected from invaders. Survived under wave under wave under wave of the Enemy. This house came to see you as a daughter. It doesn’t feel like it now, of course. It’s been too long and not even the invitation to return home stays open forever. New daughters are made. New sons. New family, they can be found. You can be replaced—_that’s a first_—and you have been, completely, wiped out.

You like the cliff face. Like a lot of things it is absolute. It doesn’t lie to you about the fact that if you go too far you will fall, and it doesn’t hold onto any pretence that it will catch you if—_when_—you do. Or the fact that it protects the shrine built on it from storm surges and furious waves like an iron spine. If it chips or collapses or buckles under the weight, nobody will blame the cliff.

It carries an awful lot of weight, that cliff. It’s taken its fair share of beatings. It’s likely not the same shape it used to be, or remembers being, but the changes it undergoes are both its own and imposed. The forces that make it change forever out of control.

Yeah, you’re the cliff, but with blame. This makes it easier to fall away.

Nobody likes you here and that suits you perfectly fine because you don’t much like them either. They’re quick to move on, because they’re Rose’s soldiers. This has always been what they wanted. Nobody cared about the wants of the soldiers, forcibly shunted into the Earth’s crust. Mostly because you're the only Homeworld gem that survived the war. There’s pity in them when they look at you, and not a word said despite the mouths that open then ponder then close. You’ve seen a lot of backs recently. Gems who’s names you don’t know, names of those you do. Yellow Diamond never took you in again. You were no longer Pink’s prized soldier. Were you ever? 

This calls for more thought. 

When the corrupted gems healed she had you locked up in the Beta Kindergarten and then released arbitrarily when the small boy kicked up a fuss. They had a lot of learning to do, or something. That strange creature, gem-but-not, Rose-but-not, _Pink Diamond-but-not_. She never thought about apologising for that. But, then, nobody apologises to you. You were happy there, though. It felt right. Because whatever the Diamonds thought best was always best. Even now the programming works wonders.

The ocean has a song, still, that calls. It still hums, letting you know its deep, crushing embrace still has a home for you. But you’re too tired to make the trek. Too tired for anything. It’s all a bit much, isn’t it?

She stands at the beach and looks up at you with a squint. You don’t notice her, but you have before, and are unsure as to how she can see through all that hair. What you think is that she hates you, but she’s been trying to find a way to tell you that she doesn’t. Other gems tell her to, of course. Hate you, that is. That’s not one of ours. We all remember what she did. What she did to you, Ocean.

But they didn’t feel what she did. And she knows better than to try and explain. Words are not her power.

At least a muzzled dog has someone who cares enough to muzzle it. You? No. You’re a pure-bred Rottweiler running around with a leash and nobody to hold it. Some would think it wiser to have you join your sisters. Goodness knows when you’ll snap out of it and try something. 

I tried to find someone from Beta. I did. Truly. All of Holly Blue’s are Prime. They don’t know you. They don’t _want_ to know you. 

You’re the only Homeworld gem left here, because not even Homeworld will have you now. What purpose is there in an old soldier, who went from hero to villain overnight? 

Earth gems hate you for being born on the wrong side. Homeworld gems hate you for doing what the Diamonds programmed—nobody ever turns this gaze to the Diamonds, however. Their position remains, as it always will be, the same.

Her horns are like yours. These little pointed obelisks jutting just above your forehead. They ache, dully, all the time. Forever present and radiating down the front of your face like the sun has its rays on you no matter how you turn. Like a nail chewed down a fraction too far. It keeps every thought half in, half complete. It demands just enough attention to leave you unable to think more than a few seconds ahead.

You spot her—_hi, hello_—on the beach. She aches in the same way.

You’re too close to the edge. The wind at its lip whips at your hair, flings it into knots and pale snakes and waves, a constant crash of sunlit sea foam around your face. Salt clings to your lips and the sea and the wind become the same sizzling roar. There is no push from behind but a pull. Thick tendrils of air tugging and lashing your arms, blotted with corruption. It’s the most encouragement you’ve had in years. It is your first meaningful step forward.

The earth beneath you begins to sink. The baked, sun-and-sea blasted stone cracks open like a dry bone.

Your hands—powerful, strong, _useless_ things—stretch out towards the cerulean sky. They dig deep into the infinite blue, marred with stripes of white and grey-white with edges painted vivid pinks and lustrous reds and faded umber oranges and you want to touch them, to swim inside each colour.

You can’t fly.

Neither can I.

But, then. I am not the one about to walk straight off of a cliff.

I try to catch you.


	2. Diatreme

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some liberties taken here. I liked the idea of gems sinking, and walking along the sea floor. This one turned out long, but I hope it is worth the read. Added Bismuth and Lapis to the tags for their mentions. I think that's how that works.
> 
> Diatreme - a rock-filled fracture in the earth's crust, made by super heated magma making contact with shallow waters.

Nobody is around to see it happen. They hear it though, the thud of your body barrelling into mine at almost terminal velocity. The dull, heady thump of gem-flesh and sand and _poof_. Goodness knows how long we sit there. Our gems overlap, nestled together like two friends in a gentle hug. 

Maybe someone notices, if they do I can’t tell. But we stay there until the tide comes up. 

“_Ocean!_” Biggs is too late to notice I’m missing. She doesn’t see us when the sea meets the cliff, glistening so much it disguises the light refracting off the surface of our dormant bodies.

The water takes us away. Gentle at first, down its cool, sloping banks and translucent blueish green waves. The crabs are happy to see us. They raise their scarred claws and scatter. As the water gets deeper, the tides get harsher, it gets darker, it gets cold. Soon the sun is a fragment of yellow quartz rippling above the surface, it’s burning glow barely enough to cast shadows across the ocean floor. The sun withdraws, slowly, with either time or depth. The result is the same; infinite dark.

Inside our gems we shiver. We sense the end of the continental shelf. 

We’re going to dive.

As we approach the periphery of the ocean bed’s deep, black eye, the tides rip faster, tossing silt and sand like thick dust thrown from an old carpet. The yawning abyss greets us with its sudden cliff.

This is the second time you have fallen from a great height today. This is my first. So forgive the terror as the bottomless blue below now opens wide and swallows me whole.

The still ocean roars and screams as we gather speed and skirt down the harsh slope. 200 meters becomes 1000, becomes 2000, becomes 4000, the light long having left us behind.

But, I know, this is not your first time off of this cliff. But instead of a rip tide unto which our descent is a natural result, your first dive down into these frigid, crushing depths was done whilst screaming. Whilst prisoner. Whilst the cold, coursing parasite of _fear_ and _deceit_ ran thick through your burning body. Burning with friction. The push and pull between the belligerent forces of tectonic plates against the planet’s surface. 

_You were pushed under, broken by the weight above. Forced down through the crust of the lithosphere and into the hot, churning molten of the asthenosphere, and the mantle further. Here you were remade, over and over, boiled and burst and beaten. She never said sorry for that, did she?_

_But, then, nobody apologises to you._

We accelerate. The pressure of the hundreds of thousands of cubic meters pushing us until we are like crystalline bullets cascading into the abyss. Our gems ricochet off rocky outcrops and extinct volcanic vents. It disturbs our recovery, and in my less damaged, more aware state, a particularly nasty bump jolts me awake. Around me all I see is black and silver silt and your glow. It illuminates little, but catches your hard, pristine edges, and my hand snatches, immediately, for you. The warm, fiery hum of your gem fills my fist. 

This is the first time someone has been there to catch you. The first time someone cared enough to try.

I hold you against my chest, letting the warmth cut through the cold. 

As the slope shallows, beginning to level now that we approach the seabed, the force above begins to push down instead of forward—we lose speed and I turn my back, gaining a fraction of control over our fall. Objects rush by my face. Knowing I am falling makes it easier to think.

Here, I hold you in my hand. You vibrate in my palm. The weight of you is solid, steadfast, affirming. I inspect your edges painstakingly, brushing my thumb over each plane and corner of your crystal for any crack or chip. I lean in, scowl, try to make out any detail in the low light. You are immaculate. 

_But we must reach the surface, to make sure._

I have seen your exit wound – that’s what we call them – and I didn’t need to touch you to know this much. There is something vivid, thrilling, in having you in my grasp. The Earth Quartz That Could. Pink Diamond’s one-gem army. Her St Helen’s, her Krakatoa, her force of nature. The will of Pink Diamond manifest. 

You were her raised fist made to split the planet in two.

_Oh, and how she abandoned you._

We continue to slip, slowly now, so I plunge my hand into the silt and soil of the ocean bed, turning up infinitesimal particles of the past. Fragments of bone and rock unturned for thousands of years upended in seconds. The silt clings to my hair and my clothes, slips between my lips and under my tongue like grit and sand. We come to a halt when I catch my hand on the side of a rotted out, salt-eaten ship. 

I can’t rise from a hunch, my shoulders and back coiled around you like a mother bird clutching a last egg. The pressure is beginning to get the best of me. The silence leaves enough room for sense to reassert itself. The silt I upended falls fast around us. Nothing should move here. Nothing should ever change. Anything that dares shift is pressed angrily back into place. 

In my hands you vibrate, humming, feeling the hadal-depth thrum on the tense waters like harp strings. Beckoning you into its unnatural, void-like vantablack. 

The light you emit reveals only my fresh claw marks in the clayish earth, the tip of a pale whale bone, the hull of the ship I caught us on, and the scattering of tiny, silver fish. Everything is dark and distorted, lingering like ghosts of what they used to be. 

The shelf is too steep to climb. It reaches up like an infinite hand. I try to turn so that the rising shelf is to my left and the creeping slope to my right. All I can think to do is walk. 

Goodness knows how long we tumbled down these hidden slopes. People must be getting worried. Perhaps for all the wrong reasons. Whatever is happening up there in our absence, for now we—I—must find our way back. 

It gets colder the further I walk. And it gets colder. Colder still. Less things move in the dark, and fewer wrecks peer into view. Whale song vibrates down into the ocean and I catch them and follow, but no fins or dark, long faces break through the wall of water above us. 

My head is empty. Thoughts bounce around like rocks inside a tin can, spiralling out of me before I have a chance to understand them. I hum old songs, tunes I heard wafting from Beach City cafes and passing cars. The water snatches them as they leave my lips, only the vibrations in my light keep me aware of my own presence. 

I turn to the shelf, no shallower, no more climbable, than before. Tired is not a familiar feeling to me, physically, but mentally, I am running thin. The stillness crushes in at every angle, snatching reality from me. Slowly, everything begins to feel like nothing. Like the world undoes itself in the dark. 

I hold you tight and dig my hand into the earth and begin to pull us up towards the surface. 

\- 

I don’t remember much of my time after the song corrupted me, warped my light into a beast. When you’re like that there’s not much to remember. 

Prowling lowlands and highlands, stalking great distances in pursuit of that sub-volume hum. It is everywhere. Barely audible, more like something you feel, more like a vibration coming up through the earth, and yet that seems to do it no justice. Its waveforms turn the world towards its ever-changing source. When you’re corrupted like that, the world is always a downward slope, leading deeper and deeper to a destination fundamentally unreachable. You can’t not help but fall towards it. To resist is exhausting. But like a dog does not care the fence is too tall, a corrupted gem doesn’t care the song is too deep. 

We kept chasing. Whether to hear more, or to end it, I’m not sure. Depends on the gem I suppose. 

It corrupted the land, too, not just us. The song. The poison it bathed the earth in seeped deep to the lithosphere, spilling toxins into Kindergartens across the globe, churned through the liquid layers of the mantel. Lingering tones rattled the layers of rock and molten lava and disrupted forming gems. The Amethyst that was with Rose’s lot—she wasn’t just overcooked. She was poisoned. She was also lucky to break the surface at all. 

But, then, poison has always been what the Diamonds do best. Not just with their song, but with their ideology. That’s what a lot of us have forgotten. A lot of Rose’s gems, even me. Our Kindergartens were safer than most. We saw plenty of battles from afar. Plenty of Homeworld defectors who came to earth made perfect spies to turn us, slowly, set us right. Set us free. 

Beta didn’t get that. You didn’t get that. 

You’ve always been a prisoner. 

_Yes, even longer than her._

We lost ourselves at the raid. 

I’ve felt your fist upon my face before, the knuckles seemed to slot so fine into the memory that was waiting for it. Yes. Deep down I recalled you. Your colours. I always loved them. In the snow and haze you cut through the canvas of white and blue and black like a pillar of fire. 

I remember seeing you in Beta as we charged. Perfect. Beautiful. Thinking; _what a waste…_

_Yes._ I tried to kill you, once. 

I won’t pretend that there aren’t parts of you that disgust me. There are. Those cages you kept us in was one of them. Seeing the world split into fragments confused my animal mind. The song pulsed from every angle, more intense with each passing second I remained stationary. Looking back I think, _how cruel. How needless._

_Out. I wanted OUT._  
.  
You embodied all that Homeworld taught. Perfection, compliance, sacrifice—all that we had come to unlearn. All you stood for was pain, and all of us were scared, cornered, desperate. I still feel some anger, looking back. But I also know it was sown in you at birth. And looking at you, now, in my hands, I understand that there was never a moment of reprieve in your life. There was always another fight, always another ambush, another sister lost. You forgot what it was to form connections, because all you knew was that they would be taken from you. 

I heard your voice reverberating off of every edge and vast cliff face. That reverent tone, that imposed self-confidence. You recite the mandate of the Diamonds because it’s all that keeps you from falling apart. 

Not that, as you reach for me, it does you much good. 

I want two things in that moment: I want to follow the coursing song down it’s perpetual slope, and I want to see what has become of you. When you face me I lean in, and I let it happen, because I want to. 

Our fusion stays together only so long as my desire to know why that perfect gem I once saw on the battlefield has become so hollow overrides that of the song. It isn’t long, but it is enough. 

It feels like falling. There’s a hollowness in you that yearns to be filled and it pulls me in. We’re apart, so much apart, that it never feels like we ever are whole. Fragments of us touch, join, for just a second, enough for us physically to be whole but mentally we cannot find each other. Your desire is so much different than my own. We are slivers of light through a prism, we are separated, split. 

I feel that searing, blistering heat of loathing you keep. It is small, hot, white like the whites of eyes, and it is churning the fabric of you around itself. There are seeds of breakage. I am plunged into this part of you. 

Inside it is a song, coming up deep from the ocean bed. 

My corruption is drawn to that seeping ocean song you hold, momentarily distracted. The sound crawls into me, hidden deep inside you. It buys me the time I need to delve deeper. To see the cause of your ache—shocking pink and deep, royal blue. A clash of colour too harsh, too sharp, to be beautiful. It cuts so deep into your light that it begins to turn green. 

This is the second time I realise that what you’re doing isn’t your own idea. 

Someone did this to you. So, you do it to others. 

You think this is an acceptable tactic. 

Nobody has told you it wasn’t ok. 

_Because it was done to you._

The pressure grows, the world becomes dark and cold, I feel your arms tense. Your body becomes mine. Our arms are weary, aching, sharp with pain. We tire against biting chains of semi-solid water and ice. The weight of the ocean keeps you down, presses you deeper against the seabed. 

She wants to crack you with it. 

The lapis unmakes you, over and over, and her effort is power, the ocean bends to her will. Her power subdues you. Deep down, there is awe and terror. Deeper still, there is pain, and the knowledge that you deserve to feel it. 

This is what fusion has always been to you. 

You haven’t tasted her yet, so you vie for control so you can break free. The hunger for this power—it comes later, nestled so close to how weak you become. You are primed to fail. 

Free. 

_Free._

Chains shatter. 

That is when I lose you. When I make the animal dash for freedom. I am lost to the song, and you turn to hold me again, we glow and dance and my deep, conscious mind reaches for your hand, trying to keep itself grounded, real, alive. To make some connection within you, to shout through light and time, “You are not alone!” 

But I am offended. My open palm becomes a fist, and I remove you with force. 

I flee. 

I carry a part of you with me, now. As you took corruption like a seed from inside me, the corruption chipped some of you away too. Your anger, boiling and pressurised, pressing against cracked and buckling earth, willing a weakness to set it all free and erupt, magnificently, in self-destruction. 

I feel your turning. Your light convulses. It unlocks that seed, that fragment you held contained. It splits, and the fire flows freely. The blue that is poison and my corruption mix, toxic as it all seeps through your body. Your frequency is warped, your mind fractures—though it was only held together by lies, anyway. 

I don’t hear what you say, but I feel it. Your eruption. You become like me. You come home. 

\- 

When we break the surface everything is cold and the slope is ice and snow and across is thick, looming black rock. I am stunned as I bob at the surface, looking up at this hunk of lifeless crust jutting out of the earth and sea. I cling to an outcrop and prepare to wade into the snow. 

Once up out of the ocean, I let myself fall forward, appreciating the open air and the solid ground. I lift up my head and survey the area. We’ve gone south. So, so far south. The sea is choppy, dark, and the sky above is angry and grey and low and the clouds cover much of the island up hill. Wind rips past, howling as is drags across the smooth edges of ice and snow. With you in my fist I bring it close to my face, close so you can hear. 

“Ever been to the antarctic before, Nena?” I smile and I open up my palm. 

In you, cutting up the left side of your gem, is a crack. 

\- 

I’ve been trying to talk to Bismuth because she was there too. The raid. It was awful. I—we—watched your birth, and we put you to the sword. 

_And how the earth shook, opened wide, like it congratulated itself for the creation of you._

We tried, anyway. We got a lot of your sisters, and severed your ability to makes connections, to know love, because we snatched it from you. I remember. I remember as I swung around with the sword Bismuth made me, aiming for your nose thinking what a weird place to put that. Only in retrospect did I know that what I saw in you was fear. 

I was your first punch and you know what? I’m proud of that. I deserved it. 

Now we’re all mad that you resent us for it. That you picked up your own weapon against us. As if we weren’t the ones who started that fight. 

We’re programmed to come out expecting agates and sisterhood and family. You couldn’t process what was happening to you. 

_This pain. Is it family? Is it love?_

I doubt you’ve ever been able to process anything after that. 


End file.
